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Tuesday, November 24, 2009

How We Find The Books We Publish

(The following numbers are one season from one editor--probably not statistically significant, but interesting nonetheless)

Out of curiosity, and because we love data so much, I decided to take a look at one season of my list and analyze how we had found the books we acquired to publish for that season.

There are 36 fiction titles on my list in that season.

11 of these came to us through submissions from agents

10 were submitted directly by the authorOf this 10*2 of the authors had an agent already*3 signed an agent after we made our offer

15 are books that we pursued by contacting the agent or author ourselvesOf this 15:*3 who were unagented when we approached them, signed an agent after we made our offer

Of all 36 books on the list,4had been previously self-published with sales of about 1000 copies or more. They were available from on-line retailers as well as by ordering from the major book retailers.

I receive200-250 submissions per month. I would estimate that 60% of the submissions come from agents, and the rest directly from authors.

I have never, in 16 years of acquisitions, acquired a book for mainstream publishing that had been vanity-published.